previously not centralized: hard drives, flickr, etc.
need central repository for tri-campus initiative with search & discovery, preservation, long-term access to content and metadata, support for multiple formats (e.g. images, books, documents, video, exhibits)
It’s big and complex. A lot has been done and researched, but not put together.
The information literate person is an information culture needs a broader, more creative and critical information and media education, not only to enjoy the economic benefits of digitally based infrastructures, but to fully engage either the social, political, and creative dimension of the developing information culture of the 21st century.
Hoping to lead to wise and ethical use of information.
Information Literacy as Discipline
professional associations and journals
international community
academic departments
graduate students
id with the discipline
distinctive language
knowledge and research base
Continuing to use the term, because it’s used at the international level. In essence, doesn’t really matter what term we use if we can connect the different areas. Partly, because there is no real alternative term. What you need to keep in mind is that the meaning may change depending on the context (work, subject, country), and users will express different needs.
Information Literate University
This includes graduates, academic peers elsewhere and wider society, but more specifically include:
Info Literate Curriculum (in curriculum, as discipline)
Info Literate students
Info Literate Research
Info Literate staff & managers
Staff development for IL
Management for IL (strategy, policy, resourcing, infrastructure, knowledge & research)
To move towards such a university, need to think about what forces can bring about this change, including:
whole course redesign
strategy for education (in institutional plan)
specific student learning environments
theoretically informed case studies
Institutional Strategies
A chance for opportunity spotting. For example, cross disciplinary research, and cross organization research. Another example is engaging students through thinking about how to integrate learning instead of just one off workshops, and using tools to enrich learning. Information literacy might be the discipline of the librarians (as faculty). Zones of action might include workshop model of educational development for librarians with subject/university focus with themes of assessment and online learning objects.
Mainstreaming IL
Many ways to to engaging academic staff.
pre-empt negativity
identify downside of not shifting
identify lecturers who have refixed the rate (combining staff time, etc.; transmissive vs. constructivist)
develop scenarios for refixing the rate
Teaching-Learning Environment
Student spending more time engaged in:
acitivites designed for deep processing of info
developing knowledge of reliable sources
etc.
Need to think about:
specific pedagogic approach
a
infrastructure such as classroom setups
e-learning: process of; focus on approach, not learning objects
Conclusions
Think BIG
Associate IL eith global themes, educational achievement, and institutional success
teach, learn, research, and communicate through IL
Challenge doubters and convince supporters
Workshop Notes
In the afternoon, we worked in groups to come up with different strategies to mainstream information literacy.
Aims and Strategies
Research a core group at every level and convince faculty of the value
Have students understand that the information they are looking for is available at the library
Education of the faculty
Building relationships with faculty
sharing successful stories and strategies
become more embedded: courses, research
building enough of a relationship to do a course redesign
maintain face to face contact
ensure programmatically implemented
testing critical student thinking
e-textbooks
audit course outlines and develop IL arguments or zones of intervention, then include statement
IL becoming component of the institutional teaching methodologies, sneaking it in
subject related divisions within OCUL which don’t exist
student survey on student info seeking and help behaviour
co-teaching
Key Levers
new strategic plan and new administration
related committees in teaching, curriculum, and info literacy
dealing with funding changes due to university specialization declarations
collaborations cross-university
integration of tutorials, tools, and services into environment e.g. Course Management Systems
making use of existing communications and marketing avenues e.g. Taking advantage of assessment to get support from upper administration
AACSB (accreditation)
program/course proposals
program review
online courses/e-learning
copyright
faculty meetings
conferences
Partners
faculty liaisons and subject experts
library “champions”
other university departments e.g. Writing centre
librarians at other universities
Student services
Academic support
Teaching co
quality assurance framework
OCUL
Connecting It All
The key points to be taken forward.
Sustaining
Teaching chairs (R)
Teaching & Learning commons (Y)
Growing
growing learning commons to include topics of academic integrity
building on tri-mentoring to find out what info literacy skills employers are looking for (R)
meta-level points for engaging faculty in importance of IL e.g. Info society, ethical issues
getting upper admin buy-in and budget
opportunities for embedding and assessment
Initiating
R-Y partnership to talk about success & challenges specific to subject areas building on informal network
writing IL modules for courses that can be collaborative and shared
syllabus audit looking for IL opportunities
IL committee
Partnering
college (workshops, drop-in)
career centre
learning skills
tri-mentoring
other librarians in same subject
accreditation bodies: building on industry expectations
within the university: faculty liaisons
Developing library staff
more intensive opportunity to discuss these issues with outcomes of program documents or policies, etc. beyond just a one day workshop
The University of Toronto iSchool was lucky enough to get Steve Krug of Don’t Make Me Think fame. If you haven’t read it and you’re at all interested in usability, I would definitely recommend it. Anyway, here are my notes from today’s talk.
Goal
Convince you that usability testing is the most valuable thing you can do to ensure that what you’re building works.
12 Years Ago – The Debate
Realized seeing the same story over and over again. He first started by turning it into a comic. Basically the same debates happened over and over, frequently without decisions being made. It’s difficult to find a middle ground, because each person comes with their own perspective. Partly, there’s no hard and fast answer, because it depends on the context.
Usability testing eliminated most debates. Seeing users use what they designed changed their perspective and start talking from the user perspective rather than personal biases.
Keeping It Simple
Traditionally, usability is done in a lab with the minimum 8 users in a day by an outsider, ending in an expensive report which may not be convincing to the team.
Rocket Surgery Made Easy written more for people intending to actually do usability testing.
Just do it with:
3 users per round
set up a monitor in another room to watch
record screencast
no stats, no faux validity, but produces meaningful insight
no big report, just debrief over lunch, report in 1-2 page email
Live Demo
Use script, which can be downloaded from Krug’s website. Instead of a website, he did a live demo on the Clear mobile app. Interestingly, the participant could not complete the task, which was interesting since the app is highly praised.
RSME: The 22-minute version
6 Maxims
A morning a month is all we ask.
Start earlier than you think makes sense. – Can start before you start by testing a competitor’s or old version, or even a sketch on a napkin.
Recruit loosely and grade on a curve. – Take just about anyone, and judge whether everyone would have that problem or if it’s just because not from target audience.
Make it a spectator sport.
Focus ruthlessly on the few, most serious problems. – Right away write down the top 3 problems to take into debrief.
When fixing problems, always do the least you can do. – The smallest change might do to solve or help mitigate the problem. Tweak, don’t redesign.
Q&A
James Chudley CX Partners wrote on the approach to doing mobile app testing that needs context.
Tools for Remote Testing – Goto Meeting, WebEx and need high quality audio
Analytics good to help know what to test
Do usability more frequently rather than testing a lot of people, because you quickly hit diminishing returns
Task specification – allow user to have the choices of content
Where to even begin? My mind is still reeling from the awesomeness that was MozFest almost a week later. I suppose the best place is for those who aren’t familiar…
What is MozFest?
The Mozilla Festival is an annual weekend event where (mainly) Mozilla Foundation, its affiliates, and others (because anyone can submit proposals) hold sessions (presentation, workshops, or hackfest type sessions) on some of the cool, open things that have been happening. That’s how I see it anyway.
There is a big range of people who attend of different age, background, tech-savvyness, geographic location, everything. I will say that there were different streams, which made some groups more prominent (other than developers), such as journalists and educators.
Science Fair
The digital, technology version of a regular science fair. People got to show off stuff that has been made, especially within the past year since the last MozFest. Highlight for me was definitely the banana piano. Simple, but ingenious use of MakeyMakey with an Arduino unit where you hold the ground and when you touch one of the bananas, it completes the circuit and knows which banana you touched, ultimately playing a sound and animating a digital keyboard.
Opening and Closing Circle – Day 1
I actually don’t have any notes for the plenaries of the day 1. For the first time ever, I felt the need to closed my laptop and just listen. However, the streaming videos are online on the MozFest website.
Sessions
Gunner at Work Open Session
I didn’t attend very many sessions, because I was busy doing other things much of the time, but two in particular stood out for me.
The first on how to work in the open turned into a particularly interesting session, because Gunner (Allen Gunn) came in to check up on us and asked if we needed anything. The response was “our facilitator”. So while Matt Thompson was “coming”, Gunner stepped in and totally winged a Q&A + discussion session. It was great. You can find my notes in a recent post.
The second was the fireside chat with Mark Surman on the future of Webmaker. It was interesting to hear about the big lessons they learned and the direction in moving forward, especially with Thimble since I’m fairly familiar with it. One of the questions that Mark wanted us to answer in the discussion was what projects (i.e. templates) we could make (either in Thimble or Popcorn) that would be popular. One of the answers inspired me to hack together a new Thimble project (if you’re not familiar with Thimble projects, take a look at the list of Thimble projects). More on that later.
While not exactly a session, I have to mention Codery’s Badge Bingo. They added another fun game factor to collection badges at MozFest, plus they gave away a t-shirt to every person who got bingo. It was great.
Helping Out
So when I wasn’t attending sessions, I was helping out with various things. I did a lot of random, being a gopher type things, and helped with setup and clean up of some sessions. The afternoon of the first day, I hung out to help with the HTML5 Hackable Games session.
I was also a Human API. Basically, people could ask questions, in my case about HTML and CSS stuff. I didn’t get many questions though, so next year, they might need to coordinate to have people with certain skills help out at certain sessions to make better use of the Human APIs.
Demo Party
I didn’t really have anything ready when I submitted my name to be part of the demo party, but what the heck, I figured I’d have something put together even if it wasn’t polished. Since there was a Thimble table, I ended up providing my project as a Thimble example.
Interestingly, I ended up staffing the table by myself, so I got to talk about Thimble in general as well as my project. Apparently, I was good enough and know enough about Thimble that I could pass for a MoFo staff member. ^^
So here’s a summary what I talked about during the demo party in regards to my project:
Hacking Together a New Thimble Project
Inspiration
One of the answers to what might make a popular Thimble project was “school projects”. I immediatly thought of the poster projects we had to make in school and how I really disliked having to print everything, and cut and paste each bit straight (and if you screwed up, having to do it again). Wouldn’t it be so much easier if we could just do a digital version and display it? (or if necessary, print the whole thing off).
Making the Project
I spent a couple of hours putting together a poster thimble project. I wish I had more graphic design/artistic talent, because as it stands, it kind of looks like somthing from the geocities age (ugh), but for me, rather than the look, it was more important to make it so that it’s:
easy to use – no CSS and very little HTML required
flexible – hackable if you know HTML & CSS
In particular:
separate title & footer areas
column classes are reused – don’t need to specify first, last, inner, or outer.
image classes – text wrap on right or left, or centre with no wrapping
works cited area – automatically floats this in bottom right above footer
Since we were at MozFest, I couldn’t help but use red pandas!
To Do
I want to clean it up, insert instructions, and separate the CSS into external and internal blocks. I’d also like to add ways to possibly rotate blocks of text or images.
I’ve also requested from the projects coordinator a small bit of time from a graphics designer to make it look nicer and more professional looking.
Extended Use Case
I created it with school kids (primary and secondary) in mind, but someone mentioned that they would find this useful for university presentation and conference posters as well. I was very happy to hear that they thought it would be useful beyond my original intention.
Other Demos
I took a bit of time to walk around the room and see what else people were up to. The Hackable games section was definitely interesting to see, especially with the one button arcade boxes. The MakeyMakey step visualizer was a crowd draw as well.
I went to MozFest with the intention of simply hanging out and helping out. I never thought that I’d be inspired to hack anything together, because I’m just not a coder. I was inspired not only by the talks and ideas, but by the attitude and enthusiasm through MozFest. I never thought that I’d even have my project featured first on the demo page.
So, thanks MozFest, and hope to be there next year.
